BESC1020 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Babbling, Fante People, Phoneme
25 May 2018
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Language
Language is our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to
communicate meaning
• Piker , stated laguage is the jeel i the ro of ogitio
Language Structure
Considering how we might go about inventing a language. For a spoken language, we would need
three building blocks:
1. Phonemes simply said in language is the smallest distinctive sound unit
❖ Phonemes are the smallest distinctive sound units in a language
❖ To say bat, English speakers utter the phonemes b,a, and t. (Phoneme are’t the sae as
letters. That also has three phonemes – th,a and t)
❖ English language uses about 40 phonemes; other languages use anywhere from half to
more than twice that many
❖ As a general rule, consonant phonemes carry more information that do vowel phonemes
2. Morphemes in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or past of a
word (such as a prefix)
❖ Smallest language units that carry meaning
❖ In English a few morphemes are also phonemes – the article a, for instance
❖ Most morphemes combine two or more phonemes
❖ Some, like bat or gentle are words
❖ Others – like the prefix pre- in preview or the suffix –ed in adapted – are parts of words
3. Grammar in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand
others. In a given language, semantics is the set of rules for deriving meaning from sounds, and
syntax is the set of rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences.
• Grammar is the system of rules that enables us to communicate with one another
• Grammatical rules guide us in deriving meaning from sounds (semantics) and in ordering
words into sentences (syntax)
• Like life constructed from the genetic code’s siple alphaet, laguage is opleit
built on simplicity.
• In English, for example, 40 or so phonemes can be combined to form more than 100,000
morphemes, which alone or in combination produce the 616,500 word forms in the
Oxford English Dictionary
• Using those words, we can then create an infinite number of sentecnes, most of which
(like this one) are original
Language Development – When Do We Learn Language?
Receptive Language
• Childre’s laguage deelopet oes fro sipliit to opleit
• Infants start without language (in fantis eas ot speakig
• By 4 months of age, babies can recognise differences in speech and sounds (Stager & Werker,
1997)
find more resources at oneclass.com
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• They can also read lips: They prefer to look at a face that matches a sound, so we know they can
recognise that ah comes from wide open lips and ee from a mouth with corners pulled back (Kuhl
& Meltzoff, 1982)
• This arks the start of the deelopet of aies’ reeptie laguage, their ailit to uderstad
what is said to and about them
• Ifats’ language comprehension greatly outpaces their language production
• Even at 6 months old, long before speaking, many infants recognise object names
• 7months and beyond, babies grow in their power to do segment spoke sounds into individual
words
Productive Language
• Log after the start of reeptie laguage, aies’ productive language, their ability to produce
words, matures
• They recognise noun-verb differences – as shown by their responses to a misplaced noun or verb
– earlier than they utter sentences with nouns and verbs (Bernal et al., 2010)
• Before urture oulds aies’ speeh, ature eales a ide rage of possile souds i the
babbling stage,
Babbling Stage
• Beginning at about 4 months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously
utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language
• Many of these spontaneously uttered sounds are consonant-vowel pairs formed by simply
bunching the tongue in the front of the mouth (da-da, na-na, ta-ta) or by opening and closing the
lips (ma-ma), both of which babies use for naturally for feeding
• Babbling does not imitate the adult speech babies hear – it includes sounds from various
languages
• From this early babbling, a listener could not identify an infant as being, say, French, Korean, or
Ethiopian
• B aout oths old, ifats’ alig has haged so that a traied ear a idetif the
household language
• Without exposure to other languages, babies lose their ability to hear and produce sounds and
tones from outside their native language
• Thus by adulthood, those who speak only English cannot discriminate certain sounds in Japanese
speech
• Nor can Japanese adults with no English training hear the difference between the English r and l
• La-la-ra-ra may sound like the same syllable repeated.
One-word Stage
• The stage in speech development, from about 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single
words
• They have already learnt that words carry meaning,
• They now begin to use sounds – usually only one barely recognizable syllable, such as ma or da –
to communicate meaning
• Family members learn to understand, and gradually the infants language conforms more to the
families language
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find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Language is our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning: pi(cid:374)ker (cid:894)(cid:1005)(cid:1013)(cid:1013)(cid:1004)(cid:895), stated la(cid:374)guage is (cid:862)the je(cid:449)el i(cid:374) the (cid:272)ro(cid:449)(cid:374) of (cid:272)og(cid:374)itio(cid:374)(cid:863) Considering how we might go about inventing a language. For a spoken language, we would need three building blocks: phonemes simply said in language is the smallest distinctive sound unit. Phonemes are the smallest distinctive sound units in a language. To say bat, english speakers utter the phonemes b,a, and t. (phoneme are(cid:374)"t the sa(cid:373)e as letters. That also has three phonemes th,a and t) English language uses about 40 phonemes; other languages use anywhere from half to more than twice that many. As a general rule, consonant phonemes carry more information that do vowel phonemes: morphemes in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or past of a word (such as a prefix)
